Chasing the Dragon (44 page)

"Stop," she said at one point, and he realised she didn't mean in
her story. He stopped. "I smell something," she said. "Go slower." But
after another step she stopped him again. "No, that is far enough. I
must lead now. Stand still until I am ready. And beware, what you perceive must change now. You will see this place as I see it. As you have
carried me with you, I will carry you. Do not attempt to do anything
unless I tell you to. I must hide you so well even the land does not
know you or we will not be able to go further. Only the dead or the
unliving may pass beyond this point. We are at Last Water."

Darkness fell like a theatre curtain being drawn from behind him
and moving through him forwards until it had consumed the path, the
mist, and all he could see. He felt unusually light, and then weightless. He tasted the expensive flavour of Glinda's cigar suddenly, and a
hint of bourbon. Then his perception of himself as a separate entity
vanished. Floating lighter than air Glinda crossed Last Water and he
went with her, at her shoulder, as if he were her shadow cast by a pale
and unmoving sun.

She tracked life, he realised. She could smell it, taste it, feel it with
the acuity of hawk sight. The vampires and ghosts she had named were
just as easy to discover as they had been invisible to him. He was
astonished that there were many kinds of undead things there. Undead
was not the right word; neverliving would have made more sense, but
he hadn't got the right words for these beings, because all his words
about being implied life. These things existed on a plane without
bodies but not without structure. They had forms, energetic and
aetheric in nature, and they had will and intent, motion and various
kinds of hungers, all of which behaviours implied life again so that he
found his previous understanding of what death meant to be inadequate, or even in error.

"Life," Glinda said, growing impatient with the flossing about of thoughts that seemed to be the legacy of his natural thought style and
not just a linty residue, "is perfectly good for them as a term if you
would get rid of that insistence that only things with material forms
on certain planes can be alive. Dump that and it's fine. They're things
living on another plane, one in which the energy bodies of humans,
elves, demons, and materially focused creatures of all kinds do not persist beyond Last Water without one sodding hell of a lot of effort. Most
pass through without a scrap of trouble or awareness. They're dissolving before they know they're here." She flew like a gossamer cloak
and there was no mist for her, just the swarms and mothlike flutterings
of the unliving things and the spaces between them.

"Necromancers are usually the only individuals who make the
effort. The creatures here are in their natural habitat, a plane of limited
matter and energy, a place of transition where dissolution is easy and
formation difficult. They have been known to penetrate the lower
levels and gain themselves bodies now and again, and sometimes they
parasitically attach to weak people, which is why you know them at all.
Idiots summon them occasionally. They are attracted to living energy
forms, as you would call them, because of their complexity and abundance. They can live and become strong by consuming the energies of
others."

Zal looked around the darkness, making out the drifting, sliding
forms of the deathless things. All shape and almost all definition had
gone. In Glinda's world there was, and there was not, and there was not
much difference between the two. "I thought you said the living
existed here."

"They're here," she said. "Everywhere. I just haven't been paying
attention to them because they crowd the trail. I'm looking for a living
thing that sustains good form in this plane without a material root,
but you can see the others if you like."

For a moment the subtle blacks that had been omnipresent
bloomed with radiance. It emanated from huge numbers of glowing egg-shaped vessels of light. They moved in clusters so vast they were
like blooms of algae on a fertile sea, joined here and there by little tendrils of gold-some form of energetic connection. Scattered between
them were clouds of dispersed dust, like glitters, which moved about
as if in their currents. They were separated by dark flows of what he
realised suddenly was malignant force. Meanwhile, around them like
moths, the vampires and other beings fluttered and swam, trying to
burrow into the patterns and shoals, thrashing in the dark streams like
ecstasy-crazed dancers, clinging here and there to individuals as he'd
once seen killer cells clinging to a virus as they consumed it; a feeding
frenzy of sharks in a giant swarm of odd jellyfish.

Glinda turned off the life-o-vision, or whatever it had been. "You
see?" she said, and wound her long tongue around her cigar, expertly
switching it to the other side of her mouth. "Way too busy."

"Blinding," Zal said, content to stay superficially sardonic and not
have to dabble too much in his real horror at what he had just seen.

Adrift, moving like the biggest predator in a bad ocean, Glinda
smoothed her way onwards. "The Void Border," she said to Zal. "I
would bet he is there, switching between places so he can hide." She
began to swim with purpose, or walk or run-it was hard to say. They
moved at a great pace.

Zal enjoyed the feeling for a moment. "But back to my story," he
said, trying not to notice that the creatures they passed now were
growing in power and form, size and intensity. Even through a solid
coat of Glinda he could feel their polarity, and it was anti-him, razor
sharp, malevolent. "Why did I go into military service?"

"It wasn't the military. It was defence," she said. "The best fighters
went into the secret service, but it was there that the biggest part of
the civil war was being fought, covertly of course. You wanted to tip
the balance and that was where the action was, so you made yourself
out to be a hundred percent High Caste, passed the initiation tests....
What now?"

"I was just wondering, if these things are bad things and they are all
here, and you are here and travelling and ... well, aren't you one of them?"

"I am not," she said. "I exist in the same manner. Were you a high
elf focused on the will for power?"

"I'm guessing not, but that's because of the tone of the question really."

"You were a bleeding-heart revolutionary," Glinda said impatiently. "But you were still an elf."

"I sound tedious and immature and a bit whiny, the way you speak
of it."

"I'm glossing!" Glinda snorted dismissively. "It's not easy trying
to tell you all this and hunt through the evil that has no name at the
same time."

"You didn't use the e-word before."

"Well I'm using it now. I don't have time for a metaphysical discussion in addition to everything else. There. These things are evil.
Can't you feel it?"

"I thought I was being living-ist and overly judgemental about it,
but yes. Since you mention it. Why are they ... ?"

"Zal. We did this whole good-and-evil schtick already for twentyfive years living wild in the backwoods with your father's people, and
you concluded that you didn't care about the causes or makings of
good and evil; whether by individual choice or by preexisting influence
of higher minds or whatever damn reason, you were going to do whatever you thought was right at the time guided only by the light of your
own spirit and the vision of your own dream. And for good or ill or
ridiculous you have done so relentlessly ever since without the
slightest regard for anybody's opinion." She paused and the smell of
bourbon suddenly burst around them. "So, do you want to know what
happened after you became a leader in the secret service, or don't you?"

She sounded annoyed. They were now moving so fast that everything that was not them was a blur of unrecognisable malcontent.
"Yes," he said, trying to be humble though he was rather excited at how heroic he had tried to be when he was young. "Carry on. But first,
do you think you can sing the Gloria Gaynor song, the one you said
was on the radio the first time I went into Otopia? The one that
changed me forever."

There was a brief period of silence. "Some people felt you were a bit
of a jerk," Glinda said, confidentially. "It's because you took very seriously your dream that you shouldn't take anything seriously even
though the contradiction implied a passion that was relentlessly
opposed to frivolity. You were contradictory. The song confirmed
everything you hated about your own people. Although they were not
really your people." She stopped her rant as he wondered why she was
harping on, and said, "I don't sing." There was a desperate taint in her
declaration, as if she secretly loved to and longed to be discovered.

Zal sighed. "You must. I used to. You must know every song I ever
listened to." He tried hard, but the only tune he could recall was still
the one Mr. V had made him think of, and he was saving that in case
another one never stuck fast in his mind. Glinda had told him about
his musical talent, but she needn't have. He would have loved music
even if the only thing he'd ever heard was Mr. V's whistling as he laid
the fire logs and made up Mina's dinners.

"You don't understand how very nearly dead you were," Glinda
said quietly at this recollection.

"Sing it!" He thought he did understand. Years had passed like
minutes, tens of thousands of days the same as the last without a trace
of longing or anguish. "Go on. Sing it. Please."

"If I do, will you shut up?"

"Yes," he promised with confidence. He did want the rest of the
story, but he had to hear the songs themselves in all their magical
wonder. He wanted to feel alive.

Glinda had an amazing voice, like a foghorn full of gravel. Dark
creatures fled before it.

"... At first I was afraid, I was petrified ..."

Lila took aim at the freezer door and shot it out with a rocket. She
should have known that one second of mercy would lead to a hellish
shovel of shit in Demonia. It might have closed itself, but she didn't
think so. She was not surprised to find the scattered body parts of the
demon whose neck she'd just broken in the debris. That figured,
finally, she thought, wondering at how slow she was getting.

This place had no light because the occupants didn't need it. They
were blind. The mirror clearly worked despite this on any unshielded
eyes, which was worth knowing, but more worthwhile was the conviction that she had stumbled into a necromancer's house and zombie
workshop. The fact that it connected to the mirror's hiding place and
had a regular maintenance routine going meant Teazle wasn't safe. But
the enclosure and the routine also meant that the master was both in
residence and not in residence. She would have bet all Teazle's money
that he was in the mirror.

Sadly, the only necromancer she knew or would have trusted was
dead.

A quick search of the rest of the house revealed no more unliving
servants, though she wasn't willing to count on the fact that some
couldn't appear. There was a lifetime's supply of arcane books and
equipment. She could search it, looking for information about the
mirror, but if she were in charge of such an object she wouldn't have
left any instruction manuals around, so she abandoned the idea.

She ran back down to the subbasement and found the servant's bag.
Slinging it over her shoulder, she took a moment to kick around and
ruin all his preparations for the big closing ceremony, then jumped
down the stairs and took off through the labyrinth as fast as she could
go. This time around she noticed that the tunnels here were much
more recently carved out. They joined the old labyrinth after a few hundred metres of gradual descent, and their smooth sides gave way to
ragged edges and lower roofs.

She reached the mirror room after a minute and made sure her eyes
were shut and disconnected before she found her way back through the
stone dead to Teazle. She rubbed his ear and kissed his face as she
passed him and put herself where the servant had knelt, uncovering
the mirror and holding it so that she could see the blackness and the
frame behind her. Then, recording a brief explanation in case this was
the most stupid idea ever tried, she opened her eyes.